Conservative Professors: Welcome, or Not?

Sept. 18, 2017

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CreditSam Rowe

To the Editor:

In “Don’t Shun Conservative Professors” (Op-Ed, Sept. 15), Arthur C. Brooks tries to make the case that university culture would be better served by welcoming and promoting to leadership roles academics who are ideologically conservative.

He justifies his proposal by arguing that intellectual diversity on campus promotes a good university’s primary mission: debate and the unconstrained pursuit of truth.

Such an approach, he contends, would be consistent with the progressive movement’s long-held credo that it is the duty of the majority (liberals who predominate on campus) to fight for the minority even when that contravenes self-interest.

Although Mr. Brooks convincingly establishes that conservatives are marginalized in academia, his argument misses the point. The soul of true scholarship is a search for new meaning and a rigorous testing of old bromides. Conservatives, by definition, are committed to upholding or returning to the status quo and to resisting groundbreaking change.

That is hardly a mind-set to be celebrated and rewarded at institutions dedicated to inquiry and pursuit of new challenges.

GERALD HARRIS, NEW YORK

To the Editor:

Ideologies are deep-seated beliefs about societal values and human nature. They are the soil out of which policy preferences grow. Doing away with ideologies is impossible. Everyone is guided by them, whether aware of it or not.

What we need, then, are the best possible ideologies: those that are the product of thought, examination and spirited debate.

Modern American liberalism and conservatism were forged in the 1950s and early 1960s. Both are now running out of gas and entering a period of redefinition. That is one reason everyone feels a bit adrift and why there is much angst in the body politic.

Redefining our two great political ideologies will not go well if all of our best thinkers are locked away in ideologically segregated think tanks. We need to put them together in university departments, where they can talk — and listen — to one another.

Liberals need to be challenged by thoughtful conservatives, and vice versa. And future generations of American leaders and voters need to hear them debating vigorously, and cheerfully.

CARL T. BOGUS, BRISTOL, R.I.

The writer, a law professor at Roger Williams University, is the author of “Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism.”

To the Editor:

Arthur C. Brooks is correct that conservatives constitute a minority of faculty in the contemporary social sciences and the humanities. But he is wrong to compare their current predicament to that of women in the past.

Historically, women’s marginalization in the academy reflected their larger marginalization in the society as a whole. It is the opposite for conservatives today: Their comparatively small numbers in academia (and especially in the liberal arts) stand in direct contrast to their dominance in virtually all other institutions of American life.

NATASHA ZARETSKYCARBONDALE, ILL.

The writer is an associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University.

To the Editor:

Arthur C. Brooks expresses his thoughts about the integration and promotion of conservatives on campus as if the reason for discrimination against conservatives were strictly political. The problem is in the actual fields.

Conservative economists believe in and promote fairy tales. Karl Marx may not have been right about the solution, but he wasn’t wrong about the inherent problems of capitalism. Left to their own devices, corporate leaders will do whatever they feel necessary to help their bottom line.

We have certainly observed and felt the impact of their poisoning the water, polluting the air and lying about the efficacy of products. Time and again it has been shown that “trickle down” economics doesn’t work, yet they still promulgate it. Government represents the people and is necessary, at the very least, to protect us from powerful interests.

GINGER LENNON, PRINCETON, N.J.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Right-Wing Professors: Welcome, or Not?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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